I've expected that there would have been more responses in
this thread...
James Carlson wrote:
> It seems quite likely to me that some people will want to have
> "networking applications" (suitably defined) disabled when there's no
> external network interface available. That strikes me as just a
> degenerate case of the more general issue that people will want to
> have a profile specifying what applications should run in any given
> situation: when I'm on network A, I use this set; on network B, some
> other set; when on no network at all, this third set.
This is related to a puzzle I had when I talked to Jan and
Garima when I was in MPK. If all network services are enabled/
disabled by a profile, what is the use of milestone/network
or the previous milestone/loopback? The question is simple.
NWAM will only enable/disable a profile when it thinks it is the
right time. At that time, whatever the network related milestone
is, it will be reached/changed. So in this sense, there is no
use for any of the network services to depend on any network
related milestone once it is under a profile. The answer I got
back was, "it's about dependency, not enabling/disabling a service."
I was still puzzled as I thought dependency is all about when
a service can be started/stopped.
Let's forget about the problem of defining milestone/network.
Suppose we take Jim's approach above, is there a need to have a
milestone/network or other network related milestone? We only
need to have all network services to be in profile control.
Correct?
> Given that most (perhaps all) applications and services, even sshd and
> xntpd, are usable when all you have is loopback, it doesn't seem
> reasonable to say that those things have a dependency on external
> interfaces and cannot run when there aren't any. That sounds like an
> effort to codify some elements of the "widely-understood default
> policy" into SMF's dependency mechanism.
>
> I do not believe that these things in fact represent dependencies as
> SMF defines and uses them.
If we don't think that a network related milestone makes sense
in SMF, let's not have one and see how things will work out. Jan,
could you please investigate this?
--
K. Poon.
kacheong.poon at sun.com
